Objectives To estimate the incidence and epidemiological profile of
childhood (0-14 years) Hodgkin’s lymphoma in Greece derived by the
network of childhood Hematology-Oncology departments on the basis of all
95 newly diagnosed cases during a seven-year period.
Methods Seventy-one of these cases were individually age and gender
matched to an equal number of controls.
Results The incidence of childhood Hodgkin Lymphoma reached a relatively
high figure of 7.8 per million children-years, with an age distribution
(2.2 for children 0-4; 6.3 for those 5-9 and 13.9 for those
10-14-years-old) and male to female ratio (1.7:1) similar to that
reported from other cancer registries. Childhood Hodgkin’s lymphoma was
more common among children living in less crowded quarters (odds ratio
(OR): 6.5 and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI): 1.4-30.7), among
those who have changed residence 60 to 18 months before the onset of the
index disease (OR: 4.4, and 95% CI = 1.4-14.0), among those whose
families owned a cat (OR: 5.5, 95% CI = 1.2-25.6) but not among those
whose families owned a dog and marginally more common, among those with
a history of infectious mononucleosis (OR: 5.0, 95% CI = 0.6-42.8).
Conclusions Our results point to infectious agent(s) as playing an
etiological role but do not allow discrimination among the delayed
establishment of the herd immunity hypothesis, the population mixing
hypothesis or that invoking transmission of the agent(s) from the
non-human reservoir
